Peter Higgins - Wolfhound Century

They felt the rush of scorching air almost before they heard the explosions. The surge extinguished the lamp in Lom’s hand. The concussions themselves, when they came, were muted, abbreviated, like heavy slabs being dropped from a height, and it took them a moment to realise what they had heard.

‘Oh, shit,’ said Lom. ‘Grenades. He’s got grenades.’

There was a longer, liquid-sounding, sliding slump, another rush of hot air, then silence and profound darkness. The tunnel had collapsed behind them.

‘Keep going,’ said Maroussia. ‘I’m right behind you. Don’t stop.’

Lom edged forward, his right hand on the rough stone wall to feel his way along, his left hand stretched out ahead of him. The darkness was total. More than the simple absence of light, it was a tangible presence. It closed in around them and pushed against them, touching their faces with soft insistent fingers, pressing itself against their eyes, feeling its way into their nostrils, the whorls of their ears, slipping down their throats when they opened their mouths to breathe, thick with the rich and oppressive smell of being underground.

Lom kept moving. He had to push his way through the insistent jostling darkness, filled with the presence of the long-departed souterrain builders, alert, curious and resentful. He felt the hairs rising along the back of his neck.

There was nothing to measure their progress by, nor the passage of time, except the sound of their own bodies moving and breathing. Raw root-filled earth and rock were all around them now, just the other side of this thin skin of stone. This flimsy, permeable wall. The wall was nothing. Negligible. With one push he could put his hand through it and make an entrance for the slow ocean of mud. Why not? Mud was only a different air. They could breathe it, if they wanted to, like the earthworms did. They could swim through it, slowly, working their limbs through the viscous, slow-yielding, supportive stuff. They could do that. If they wanted to.

‘Vissarion?’ Maroussia’s voice reached him from somewhere far away. ‘Why have we stopped?’

He had lost the wall. He had taken his hand off it. When? Sometime. He waved his arms to left and right, over his head, and encountered nothing.

‘Can you feel the wall?’ he said.

‘What wall?’ she hissed.

‘Either side. Any wall. Can you?’

‘No.’

‘Shit.’

Think. Figure it out.

They must have come into some larger chamber that the giant hadn’t mentioned. He would have assumed they’d have the lamp.

He was standing on the very edge of a bottomless pit. A narrow tapering well. One more step… any step…

No. It was a tunnel not a cave. They were not lost, only disoriented. Taking a deep breath he turned to his right and began to walk steadily forward. Four or five paces, and he barked his knuckles against the cold damp stone. Its roughness was familiar now, and comforting.

There was another concussion. It made the ground sound hollow, and it seemed to have come from just above their heads. Then the ground shook again. And again. A rhythmical pounding that was obviously not grenades, not this time. Trickles of cold stuff fell across their faces and shoulders in the darkness. It might have been earth or water or a mixture of both. The pounding stopped, and a regular scraping took its place.

‘It’s the mudjhik,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s found us. It’s trying to dig us out.’

Lom felt the mudjhik’s presence. Felt the pleasure it was feeling. The anticipation. It would haul them out of the earth like rabbits. Burst their heads between its thumbs, one by one.

‘Keep moving!’ hissed Maroussia. ‘Come on! There’s no point waiting here till it gets through.’

Yes , thought Lom, but which way? He felt sour panic welling up at the back of his throat.

Which way?

His eyes were stretched wide, straining to see in the absolute dark that pressed in against them. When he realised what he was doing, he closed them.

We are too rational, he thought. We overvalue sight.

‘Get low!’ he hissed. ‘Lie down and get out of the airflow. And keep still.’

‘Lie down?’ said Maroussia.

‘Just do it.’

Lom breathed deeply, concentrating on the air around them, ancient and cold and thickened and still. Almost, but not entirely, still. The hole in his head was open, and he was open with it. He could feel the air circulating slowly in a hollow space, and he let himself ride with it, feeling its moves and turns. There was a current eddying slowly towards a gap in the wall. Another passageway. Sloping gently upwards towards an opening into the world outside. In the darkness he crossed directly to Maroussia and took her hand.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

He was hurrying, almost running through the dark, pulling Maroussia behind him. She swore as she smashed her elbow against an outcrop of stone and almost stumbled, but he kept hold of her and pulled her on. Behind them the sound of the mudjhik’s digging had stopped. It knew they were moving. Lom felt its uncertainty. Frustration. For the moment it was at a loss. But it would find them. And it would keep coming. It always would.

The walls of the passageway were closing in. The roof was getting lower. But Lom led them on at a desperate shambling run. Then there was light ahead of them. The grey light of dawn. Slabs of stone fallen sideways. A gap half-blocked with brambles and small trees. They pushed and scrabbled their way through, ignoring the scratching of thorns and the gouging of branches. And then they were out. Standing among fallen leaves in pathless undergrowth.

Lom looked for cover, any cover, any place to hide or make a stand against the mudjhik. Nowhere. Only a tangle of low trees and undergrowth and moss in every direction.

But what sort of stand could they have made You needed a trench mortar to stop a mudjhik in its tracks. If it came, it came.

There was an acrid smell in the air. A big fire, burning. The isba!

Maroussia went crashing off towards the scent of burning. Lom was leaning against a tree, doubled over, gasping and trying desperately to get enough breath in to refill his spasming lungs.

‘Shit,’ he gasped. ‘Shit. Wait!’

Maroussia stopped and turned.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Just keep up.’

Minutes later they were crouched side by side among the trees at the edge of the clearing. The isba was in flames. Its skin covering was gone. The whalebone frame still stood, blackened and skeletal in the middle of a wind-tugged roaring fire of wood and furs and wool. White and grey smoke and clouds of sparks poured into the sky, swithering and whipping in the wind. The smoke was blowing away from them but they could smell it.

The mudjhik was a dark shape slowly circling the fire. From time to time it paused, its massive neckless head tilted to one side, as if it were listening to something. Sniffing the air.

There was no sign of Aino-Suvantamoinen. There was no sign of their human hunter either. They watched the mudjhik in silence.

Lom felt something dark touch his mind. It was the same intrusive triumphant contact he had felt in the souterrain. His hands prickled as if the flow of blood were returning to numbed extremities. His mouth was dry. He felt himself sinking into a pit of blank hopelessness. Despair.

The position is hopeless. We’re going to die.

No. That’s not my voice.

The mudjhik’s blank face whipped around towards where they were hiding, driving its eyeless gaze into the tangle of branches.

‘Fuck!’ hissed Lom. ‘It’s seen us. Run!’ He caught a glimpse of the mudjhik beginning to move towards them. A kind of lurching fall that was the beginning of its accelerating charge. They turned and fled.